The Driver Profile Selection allows you to tune the car's responses to your tastes

The steering wheel's GTI badge is neat enough, but also redundant if you've already spotted the stitching

Ergonomically, it's about as close to perfect as a hatchback can get

There's generous room in the rear

A 380-litre boot is beneficial; it expands to 890 litres with the rear seats down

A four-cylinder engine doesn't need twin exhausts, but they add a pleasing symmetry

The 2.0-litre turbocharged engine puts out 217bhp in standard guise

The Golf is competent, accurate and quick but…

…it's not as entertaining or exciting as some rivals

An excellent all-round prospect, but not the thriller it might have been

Close

No matter how ubiquitous the letters ‘GTI’ become, they are synonymous for much of the population with only one car: the Volkswagen Golf GTI. This has less to do with their original placement and more to do with serious, unbroken longevity.

There has been a Volkswagen Golf GTI on sale for as long as any of the current Autocar road test team has been alive. Although other manufacturers have been dabbling in hot hatches for close to four decades, none comes close to imprinting a single model identity on the segment in the way that VW has done.

But while it may stand alone as a recognisable icon of the class that it pioneered, the Golf GTI has been acknowledged as its leader only sporadically. Instead, VW has sought to stretch its ‘hot’ brief as thinly as possible so that it might be pulled down over a car of incredibly broad appeal.

There are few model introductions as notable as the Golf GTI’s debut at the 1975 Frankfurt motor show. In the UK, the car struck a chord, and what started as a trickle of left-hand-drive Mk1 cars in 1977 turned into a torrent by 1989, when the all-conquering Mk2 sold a remarkable 16,000 GTIs in one year.

The Mk3 and Mk4 were a comparative disappointment, but the Mk5 and copycat Mk6 marked a welcome return to better form, especially in runout Edition 30 and 35 formats.

In a bid to drag this new performance-orientated Golf towards the eyeline of those of us fixated on the Renault Mégane 265 and Ford Focus ST, VW has also opted – for the first time – to sell a 'Performance pack' version of the standard GTI.

So is the new Volkswagen Golf GTI worthy of the top billing once again? Let's find out.

If the standard car is a little too tame, but you want to retain the engagement that front-wheel drive brings, the 35 does offer an attractive compromise between the GTI and the four-wheel drive Golf R

The Edition 35 has an eager nature but it never feels quite as refined as the standard GTI